


The Tenth

by theoldgods



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Duty, Episode: s02e02 The Night Lands, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Table Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-14
Updated: 2012-04-14
Packaged: 2017-11-03 16:08:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/383366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/pseuds/theoldgods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How that infamous HBO sex scene might have ended in my headcanon world. Consensual Mel/Stannis sex with much of the dialogue from 2x02: "The Night Lands," from Stannis's perspective. PG13ish--nothing too explicit, as Stannis does not like to linger on the naughty bits of sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tenth

**Author's Note:**

> This is largely unedited, a one-off I did to play around with HBO's portrayal of the beginning of their relationship, so it's not as tight as I'd normally have fics be. Nonetheless, it's here mostly for the laughs, so enjoy. 
> 
> Originally posted on my tumblr account of the same name, edited slightly.

He glanced up at the Red Woman, standing at the opposite end of the table with her fingers splayed across the back of a chair. Some moments with her were as calm as those with Ser Davos, moments where words could rocket back and forth between the two of them without that leaden weight in his throat. At other times, however, she was just another lordling at his elbows, all honeyed words and insincere remonstrances. 

“You’re troubled, my king.”

His jaw twitched. This would be the lordling with breasts, then, tonight, wanting something of him.

“Yeah.” He turned his attention to the ship figurines Davos had left around Dragonstone, his miserable rock in the ocean of the Painted Table. If he counted them a thousand times they would not match the men ringed around Highgarden, he knew, with or without Davos’s pirate and his ships.

“These armies are toys for the Lord of Light.”

The smile the Lady Melisandre was giving him sent shivers across his scalp, and the charred remains of the statues of the Seven stood out in his mind. “Tell your Lord to burn them, then.”

Melisandre smiled, stretched, began walking around the table with her hands open. There was laughter, of all foolish things, in her voice as she said, “I tell Him nothing. I pray for His commands….and I obey.”

He ground his teeth together at that, finally tearing his attention fully away from the table and its toy armies. Words leapt from his mouth with more than his usual candor. “My little brother has a hundred thousand men according to the scouts, men whose allegiance rightly belongs to me.” _Your prayers have done nothing so far for me, my lady, except kill the maester who raised me._

She was approaching him, her eyes becoming clearer in the gloom. “You must have faith,” she murmured, the sound working its way into his ears.

What he saw and pushed back, instantaneously, was the cove at Storm’s End, drenched in wind and rain, and ships floundering on the horizon. “Faith!” A parade of septons, the Baratheon sigil rippling at half-mast from the towers, murmurs addressed to a Stranger and a Mother and who knew what other statues. “In a real war the side with the greater number wins, nine times out of ten.”

As the words left his mouth he caught the Lady Melisandre’s eyes. They were red, steady, and even, and in them he saw Davos clutching his bag of finger bones. He blinked as the woman smiled and felt something run along his spine as she finished his thought, word for word.

“Then we must be the tenth.”

Nine times out of ten, he knew, and he knew the count of soldiers and ships on the table better even than he knew that. _Nine times out of ten the world works as you expect it to, and the tenth…._

“I cannot defeat my brother in the field!” Had he ever spoken more obvious words to anyone? How did they fall so quickly from his mouth? “And I cannot…I cannot take King’s Landing without the men he’s stolen.” _Nine times out of ten Renly has stolen from me, even though I am the elder. Nine times out of ten I have played the game exactly the way I was taught…and lost._

She was leaning across a chair now, close enough that he could hear her breathing, slow and rhythmic. When she opened her mouth he saw Ser Davos in that very chair, offering him counsel that was simultaneously true and miserable to hear. The counsel she was offering him—was it different or the same?

“I have seen the path to victory in the flames,” she whispered, standing up once more, “but first you must give yourself to the Lord of Light.”

More Lords, more prayers, more fires—a different counsel from Ser Davos’s but the same counsel she had always given him. _I want different results!_ “I’ve said the words, damn you! I burned the idols!” He glared at the wooden pieces on the table, so much the same and yet so different from the statues he’d ordered burned. _I want different results._

“You must give all of yourself.”

Her voice came from his right side now—when did she move? He turned to see her and saw only long red hair and skin, so much skin. Her robe had been no more than a dressing gown, and now it hung open, revealing more skin than he had ever dreamed possible. _This is…an entirely different game._ A shudder went through him and he turned away.

“I have a wife,” he whispered. His heart was misbehaving, thudding at the base of his neck, the most foolish thing he’d ever felt. _Different from anything I’ve ever felt_ , he thought, before he pushed that thought away. “I took a vow.” He remembered the weight of the Baratheon cloak in his hands all too clearly as Selyse Florent presented her back to him, the septon’s prattling and the damnable glitter and flash of the prisms that had blinded him every time he’d ever set foot in a sept.

The hand that brushed his hair sent a spasm through him; the Lady Melisandre was close enough for him to feel her laughter, low in her throat, humming even through the fingers now pressed against his scalp. His breathing was faster, he noted, each intake of breath shallower and less helpful than the one before.

“Yes, you did,” she murmured. “You have a wife who is sickly, who is weak, who has failed in her every duty to you. You have a wife who has given you no sons.”

Sons. The only thing he’d ever asked of Selyse Florent, the one of many things he had never gotten from her. Her womb wasn’t under her conscious control, he knew, but still, nine times of ten a man could get a son eventually, couldn’t he? _Robert had two that weren’t even his but still took the Baratheon name…and the Baratheon throne._

His hands were shaking with the thoughts brewing at the edge of his consciousness. He closed his eyes rather than look at the mass of red before him, but he did not need sight to feel the Lady Melisandre’s skin along the length of his body, nor the heat that radiated more strongly from her than from the room’s hearth. _Damnably hot…unnaturally hot_ , he realized as beads of sweat formed on his forehead. Maester Cressen’s body on the floor swam behind his eyelids, poisoned like any man, but the Lady Melisandre remained.

 _The Red Woman does more than pray. She does not play by the rules of the game I was taught…but the game I was taught did not involve abominations born of incest playing with the Baratheon name, failing at the Baratheon duty._

“Why?” he asked her, opening his eyes, his voice a rasp. 

She looked up at him and smiled. “I am a priestess of the Lord of Light. Winter is coming, Your Grace, and with it the Night only the Lord of Light may fight. I must help Him. I must help His champion. I must do my duty, the same as every man.”

“And your duty involves adultery?”

“My duty is prayer, my king. Prayer and the power of the Lord.” She ran a finger along his cheek. “His power works through me and the body. All of the body.”

_Nine times out of ten I have played this game exactly the way I was taught, done everything to do my duty, and nine times out of ten I have not been given what was mine in return._

He snatched her hand away from his skin and turned his attention to the gown open before him, pulling it further out of the way. “We will do what you must, Lady Melisandre, to work these powers that you have. We will do what you must and only what you must.”

She let him lay her down on the table as he undid the laces of his breeches. His eyes swept over her from head to toe, skittering over the expanses of white skin and lingering on the bloody waterfall of her hair and the pulsing of the ruby at her neck, a rhythm he had last seen on the night his maester had killed himself trying to keep things the way they had been, yet another failure for the House of Baratheon. 

As he leaned forward and spread her legs he told himself, _Lady Melisandre is the tenth._


End file.
